Mike Dayton

Talks About

His Legendary Trademark

Feats of Strength

The comprehensive training, techniques

and preparation involved for making

Strongman Stunts Easy

By

Dennis B. Weis “The Yukon Hercules”

Distributed by www.MuscleBuildingClub.com

© 2003 Dennis B. Weis

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He walked the 'Bodybuilding hardcore competitive hot zones' at a time when the 'Hulk' television show obsessed the decades late 70’s and early 80’s, as it's peer hero of the extravagant death defying strength stunts . . . plus he was a master of arm, shoulder, torso ripping and crushing forces that perhaps 'the mythical Hulk' could have admired. But unlike the dramatically acted TV show . . . this man was 'real'. A major physique title holder in the competitive Bodybuilding arena and

exhibition strongman . . . participated on the T.V. Guinness Game Show,

and in less than two minutes earned a place in the Guinness Book of

World Records, American Edition by performing the following feats of strength with ease:

...SNAPPED TWO BASEBALL BATS IN HALF!

...SMASHED A RED BRICK AND CINDER BLOCK!

…TORE A LOS ANGELES PHONE BOOK IN HALF!

…BENT A METAL FILE AND SCREW DRIVER!

…BROKE A PAIR OF BOLT CUTTERS!

…RIPPED APART A LICENCE PLATE!

His name is now legendary history in the echoes that comprise our demonstrative iron game sport.

That name my friends is . . . MIKE DAYTON!

Many of you reading this e-report probable have never heard of him, or read a muscle magazine from that era that featured him. I invite you then to read on as Mike talks candidly about his human potential feats of very true action . . . feats you will never forget and which are absolutely remarkably true. My ego was sacked in awed disbelief and my curiosity at a fevered pitch after seeing this 200 pound strongman, Mike Dayton, perform his authentic FEATS OF STRENGTH. I desperately wanted to know more about how he prepared for and performed his thrilling superhuman feats of strength so I arranged for an interview with him. Here in his own words is what he told me.

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Mike Dayton won over 40 bodybuilding contests including the 1967 AAU Teenage Mr. America and the 1969 Mr. Iron Man title with the contest winning physique displayed here.

“Let me name some of the over 50 feats of strength that I’ve performed or perform in an average show to you. Breaking baseball bats. Now, these are usually standard baseball bats. I think I can break any baseball bat. If it’s thin, I break it in a different position. I like to karate chop them on stage or I like to take them and bend them way over so people can see that they’re real bats, not tampered with, and then snap them that way. Tearing a phone book, which is really easy, breaking red bricks or cinder blocks are very easy to do. Jumping on my little toes, a very quick feat of strength that I usually throw in because I’m usually performing in a Kung Fu outfit. Jumping on the toes is a matter of bending your toes underneath and jumping up 3, 4 feet in the air and landing with your toes underneath. I do the little finger lift where I lift a girl over my head with just my little finger. I loop it underneath her belt and pick her up and hold her. I’ve done actually 2 girls, say 130 pounds a piece and held them overhead. This is easy for me. I also, in my show, arm wrestle people from the audience using just my little finger.

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Mike postures with the Nunchaku’s, Karate’s deadliest fighting sticks.

I do a Kung Fu demonstration of coin snatching, Nunchaku sticks (Nunchuck’s), and a couple of what’s called Kata’s, in Kung Fu which is a dance as movements.

Of course, the handcuffs is always, I think, my biggest one, the hardest feat to perform. I’ll get into later how I go about performing that. I think coin bending is probably the second hardest. I don’t do that anymore because three times I’ve broken my wrist (doing the handcuff break) and now I can’t put as much strain on my wrist until I have either pins put in there or the wrist heal up.

The jump into my stomach, I’ve actually done sixteen feet with 123 pound girl jumping, both feet directly into my stomach. I’ve done a 200 pound man jumping ten feet into my stomach. I do a demonstration of fist and knuckle strength where you fall forward, slam your fist, actually making a fist into the floor. That’s usually just for martial arts shows. Bending a one inch bar actually came from bending the weight lifting bar, which I’ve gone into several different gyms locally here and actually bent the weight lifting bar, not a big bend, but a noticeable bend across my knee. Chins is another thing I throw in as far as feats of strength. I can get up and do sixty, seventy chins without even getting out of breath, go right over to the microphone and continue talking. I’ve done eighty some chins in a competition one time. I was after the chinning record, but it’s a student of mine, Curd Edmonds, who actually holds the record and that man really amazes me. I just got a letter from him the other day. His son (Chris) also does chin ups. They’re up into the 100’s, 120. With straps they’ve done

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over 200 chins. So, I’m not really going to go for a world record in that. I’m proud of that man though. At 67 years old, he’s doing a hundred some chins. It’s hard for me to understand.

Two of Dayton’s most entertaining stunts, tearing a HUGE telephone book and breaking three cement bricks with a deadly shuto axe-hand strike!

I do smaller feats like bending screw drivers, files, pliers. All your household utensils, I can take them and bend them any which way. Of course, the brick breaking I use a lot on stage. Hanging by my toes is another one I do. If I’m doing chin ups, I usually do a couple of gymnastics moves, just flipping around the bar and end up hanging by my toes, hanging by one foot, the toes on one foot. Another one I do is hold a firecracker in my hand, let it go off. I’ve popped a basketball, but I don’t like to do that because it’s extremely hard to guarantee the basketball pop every time. A basketball, for example, can be squeezed together and never actually pop on you. Very hard. You have an old basketball and hope that it’s cracked, I think, to get it to bust in half, to explode. I don’t do the hot water bottle. I don’t think that one’s really as impressive. My grandmother’s done that. Brick breaking and wood breaking, I don’t like to do that either because everybody else does it. I like to stick, mostly, to things that I’ve kind of developed myself. I try to develop feats of strength using household items, rather than feats of strength that other people…hot water bottle or something. I try to go with something people can relate with, such as the household items, the pliers, screw driver. I have broken a shotgun in half. I’ve bent an assortment of different pistols, the barrels on the pistols. I’ve broken the police nightsticks. So, I guess I could go on and on with feats. I’ll just cut it right there as far as what I’ve done.

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Well, to go into a little detail here, I’ll explain how I trained to break

handcuffs, perform the hanging, rope pull, coin bending, and tearing a

tennis ball.

Breaking Handcuffs

The breaking of regulation Police “cuffs” is one of Mike Dayton’s favorite strongman demonstrations. He raises his arms triumphantly after his efforts in the handcuff break pay off.

Now, on handcuffs, to first start off, you’re such a long way from the point

where you start off being able to break handcuffs. You’re talking about years of developing just the strength throughout your back, your trapezius, before you’re going to be able to break handcuffs. But, more than that, of course, is the mental training, that you have to be able to absorb so much pain and punishment. The handcuffs will cut through your skin and there’s nothing you can do to strengthen the skin or toughen it. On the back of my wrist, I have calluses now and scar tissue from repeatedly having pulled those handcuffs into my skin. They’ll leave a deep impression after your break handcuffs, or even after you pull on them real hard, for about a half hour, in your skin.

Now, what I did to start off training handcuffs was, I had a pair of handcuffs around and I knew the handcuffs could be broken. I always assumed that Eugene Sandow had broken handcuffs in his career as a strong man. I never realized at that time that he broke them by pitting one link against the other and pulling them apart. There’s a tremendous difference in handcuffs, which, of course, I guess being an authority on breaking handcuffs, have learned to recognize. There’s different strengths of handcuffs. There’s different degrees of metal. There’s good handcuffs and there’s poor handcuffs and there’s handcuffs that are really not worth anything. You can get cheap handcuffs, I won’t mention any of the names, that have got to be 30% - 40% easier to break than a pair of Smith and

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Wesson, Peerless or Groletti handcuffs, your standard models. I think your most popular handcuff is Peerless. Now, to begin the training, well if you’re taking somebody that has never done any weight lifting or something, I doubt if they could ever develop enough body strength to break the handcuffs. Now for example, it takes all my strength to break handcuffs. And then, there’s been times where I haven’t been able to break them. There’s been 3 times publicly where I’ve tried to break handcuffs and couldn’t break them. So, to take a person who has never done anything physically and say that you’re going to train them to break handcuffs, the chances are one in a million that he’d ever break a pair of handcuffs. To take a highly skilled athlete, a weightlifter, bodybuilder, he’s got a chance to break the handcuffs but he’s going to learn the mental portion of it, being able to focus all the energy, being able to override the pain before he breaks the handcuffs. I’ve broken handcuffs in so many different positions. You have to realize, the position I choose to break handcuffs in, in front of my body was actually one of the last positions that I was able to break handcuffs in when I was training for this. The first position was actually squatted down with my knees up into my chest and my arms around my knees, and I pried with my arms, my legs, my back. I used my rib cage as a focal point to actually stretch my arms around. There’s a way to sink your shoulders forward and swell your rib cage up with air and pry using your rib cage as a focal point to pry against. But, I don’t really know if it would be good outline an exact training method for people to break handcuffs, because I doubt if very many people are going to ever be able to break them. It would have to go much more into the mental being (chain reactions of the subconscious mind) able to withstand the pain than to actually develop the physical strength.

Training for the handcuff break is not so much the physical training that

you have to go through. It’s the mental training. You have to know you’re going to break those handcuffs. You have to be able to put enough effort in there. If you don’t break it, you want to fall over dead and try that hard that you’re going to break those handcuffs no matter what. I think the hardest thing for people to learn is the mental approach to this. It’s not something that you do physically. It’s something you do mentally. It’s a matter of putting 100% of your mind and body together at one time and exerting all your effort. Every fiber in your body has to be directed for that one thing, to break those handcuffs and I think it’s much more a mental state that you have to get into than it is any kind of physical accomplishment. So, as far as training for this, I don’t everyday put on handcuffs and actually try to pull them apart. But, I do practice getting into that mental state where I’m

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able to focus all my energy, all my strength at one time for one purpose. So, I think I practice much more the mental state to maintain these feats of strength. I’m sure there’s a lot of people out there that have the physical strength

right now to break the handcuffs ff they were able to override the pain. So,

I don’t know if you should go into more or less overriding the pain

because that is the secret to breaking handcuffs.

Hanging By The Neck

Popular West Coast strongman-Mike Dayton performing his most daring strongman feat of all in which he hangs himself with a regular hangman’s noose.

Now, the hanging developed out of a gym exercise I used to do with my younger brother, Bill where we would practice hanging by our necks and nothing more than straps that we used, hand straps, for extra heavy rows or something where we’d use the straps. We used to hang a strap over the chinning bar. We had a big loop in it. We didn’t have it so it would tighten down in any way and we’d place our chin in this loop and pretty soon, we got so we could lift our feet up off the floor, I think the first time we did it, we were pretty much able to lift our feet floor and hang by our necks there. Well, for a long time, we trained on this as a neck exercise just at the end of the workout when we would go through some neck. We’d do wrestler’s bridge and some forward bridges and we’d do this hanging. So, I got so I

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could do the hanging with relative ease and pretty soon I was doing it holding some weights in my hand. Pretty soon, I was doing it with 50 extra pounds strapped around my waist. Pretty soon, I was doing it and jumping around and hanging by my neck and actually doing leg lifts and different movements. Before long, it got so I could take a jolt. I would bounce around in the rope. We put a bench there and I’d step off six inches. I’d try stepping off a foot, a foot and a half. Eventually, it went up to, I was putting two weight lifting benches on top of each other and stepping off for probably a two foot jolt and taking this. It wasn’t until about that time that I came up with the idea of putting the hangman’s noose into it (feats of strength), which is a matter of understanding that the hangman’s noose is made to put to push your head forward. The actually noose, in a hangman’s noose that’s wrapped up is made to bend your head forward so you can’t keep your neck straight, so it’s going to break something in your neck. I get around this by doing it exactly to the back of my neck so my head can push just slightly forward. If it was to the side, I think it would be too much bend in the neck and it would probably snap the neck. Now, I don’t recommend anybody go out and try this hanging, so I don’t like to outline the exact training method that I used to obtain this because the hanging’s never been allowed to be shown on TV. I’ve had it filmed everywhere I go but it’s never been allowed on TV because of the obvious reasons that kids are going to go out and throw a rope over the swing set and try to mimic me, I think and they’re going to end up killing themselves. So, every time I

do the hanging, I always make a point to announce never to try this feat,

that this something that probably the average person just

couldn’t support his own body weight by his neck.

I always try to throw in a hanging which has become easy for me since I’ve done a six foot drop, with my hands tied behind my back, in a penitentiary in Utah where they actually execute people. I never do the six foot drop in the show. I do maybe a one foot, two foot drop because there’s no danger in the one, two foot drop for me, though I doubt the average person would have enough strength in their neck to do it! Usually, I don’t allow myself to be tied into it like I have in the past. A lot of times, I’m holding the end of the rope. In case I was to go unconscious, I could drop free (to the floor).

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The Rope Pull

Mike allows two large men to pull on a heavy rope, wrapped around his massive neck, in a futile effort to choke him.

Another one (feat of strength) I do to demonstrate neck strength is what I

call the rope pull where I have two people from the audience get on each

side of me. I put a rope with one loop in it around my neck and have them pull on both sides of the rope as hard as they can. This is a good demonstration of neck strength. Sometimes, it’s harder to do that than the hanging.

Coin Bending

Now, coin bending is another thing. I think there’s been several strong

men through time to bend coins. Eugene Sandow was one who bend foreign coins, not so much the American coins, although the old American dime, in his time, was about half the thickness of a dime nowadays. One of the first coins I started playing with was that old dime that I realized I was able to bend easily. Bending coins, again, is something that like anything else, you have to start off at some point and work your way up. It’s a matter of constantly working at it.

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I worked years on developing enough finger strength. Now, you don’t get any finger strength in weight lifting because you’re exercise stops at the end of the hands. You never use the tips of your fingers for anything. Now, the training I used came from Kung Fu, where they teach you to develop finger strength which is different than any of your weight lifting. You won’t get finger strength from weight lifting. You have to go out and do those, I call them, the standard Kung Fu karate exercises for fingers. You do fingertip push ups. You slam your finger into sand. You slam your finger into bark off of a tree that’s put into a pail or something. A lot of it is just isometric finger tensing that they teach you. We learned it in karate, actually. I think most, it would have to be in addition to their normal workout to actually strengthen the hands. You need awfully strong tendons through your elbows and your wrists too. Currently, I’m training one other person, Don Ross, a Mr. America to bend coins. He’s making real good progress with it. But, then again, I see it taking him at least a year before he gets to the point where he can bend an American quarter.

Don Ross is “Super Action” as he demonstrates the proper grip and tears a very thick telephone book in half.

I started off with different objects before I could bend coins. I didn’t start right off bending off coins. I started off doing these little…they used to give them away in gas stations, used to be called Shell, I don’t know, State of the Union. They looked like a quarter, the exact size of a quarter but they’re made out of real thin aluminum and they’d bend real easily. So, I started off bending those and I got up the point where I could finally bend a dime. I’d have to do this by bending it over something, over a table, over a sharp edge of something. I couldn’t just bend it in my hand free yet. I had to bend it over tables. So, I developed a lot of different bending strength as far as different ways to hold the coin. Then again, that’s something that’s just going to take time

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for anybody to develop enough hand strength, finger strength to be able to bend coins.

Tearing A Tennis Ball

Tearing tennis balls is another favorite one

that the people like. I take brand new tennis balls out of a container, and to tear them, you can’t squeeze them together and pop them. What you have to do is squeeze them together, bite through it, tear a hole in with your teeth, actually, and then take that hole and rip it bigger and rip it in half. The ones that I’ve listed here, I can do those so easily and routinely, and I do them every wee

Many of Mike’s feats, such as tearing tennis balls has never been duplicated to this day.

The ones that I’ve listed here, I can do those so easily and routinely and I do them every weekend or a couple of times a week in shows. I don’t actually practice for those other than the actual getting up and doing them at the shows. In the past, I have practiced and trained for each one, to develop the actual. For example, every feat of strength has a little bit of know-how that makes it possible to do it, I think. For example, tearing a telephone book is very simple to do once somebody shows you how to hold the telephone book. If you were to take it and try to simply overpower it and tear it, you would never tear it. But, once somebody shows you the proper way to hold it, then you can probably tear a telephone book. It’s very easy to do. The same thing, for example, with biting through a tennis ball (just mentioned). If you were just to take it and try to mimic me and bite through the tennis ball, you would never do it. You would have to bite through the actual rim, the seam where the ball is put together. You can’t bite through the cloth part that covers that. You have to bite through the seam.

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Mike Dayton strikes a blow to the heavy bag with a deadly shuto axe-hand!

So, I think every feat of strength has a little bit of know-how that goes with it. I don’t call it a trick or anything. It’s just a little bit of know-how.

Most of this was taught to me by one man, named Don Buck, who was my karate, Kung Fu instructor. He was a former strong man who performed a lot of these himself. He holds a world record for the little finger lift where he lifted over a 200 pound man overhead with just his little finger. Now, as far as training for these, you have to be, I think, strong to start with and then it’s a matter of being strong in other positions other than just your basic weight lifting positions. You can develop a lot of strength in the gym, but it’s always an exact strength. You have to be laying in such a position to push up so much weight. For example, a bench press, you have a groove where that’s the proper groove for your bench press. But, if you vary from that just a little bit, you lose all your strength. Now, what I’ve done is trained so differently, in a way, that I have developed, I think a lot of unusual strength. Part of it may be the fact that I’ve done labor for 5, 6, 7 years, I guess. I did moving furniture. Now, moving furniture, in addition to my weight lifting and everything, actually, I considered, I was training 15, 16 hours a day. Everything I was doing moving furniture was other than a weight lifting exact movement. Furniture was always different and it developed tremendous hand strength for me, just carrying something all day long. So, hard labor never hurts to develop that kind of strength.

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But, what you need is a wide base of strength. Not just so much the weight lifting strength that you can get from in the gym, being a body builder or a power lifter, but just the basic strength, that all over strength. For example, in fighting, in Karate, in Kung Fu, in actual sparring, you have to develop different strength for every movement. I think the person that’s got the greater amount of strength isn’t always the person that’s done the exact strength training like weight lifting, body building. I think that’s way too rigid. I’ve met people, I think, that were stronger, just in hand to hand combat, that’s never done any weight lifting. Now, as far as training for these, I don’t actually train for any of my feats of strength anymore, other than some new ones that I’m working on. I’ve trained for them in the past and trained years and years on just, say one feat, to get enough strength, enough exact strength in that position to be able to perform it. But, as of right now, I don’t do any training for them other than I go out every week and do them somewhere. And I think the fact that I’m doing them is my training.”

FEATS OF STRENGTH…NO LONGER A MYSTERY

Well there you have it. There is no longer any need to guess or question how Mike Dayton performed his authentic feats of strength. Everything you wanted to know…is clearly explained and outlined.